Blood on our hands

My Mirror column: the fourth column in my series on the Hindi hits of 1957

V Shantaram's Do Aankhen Barah Haath (1957) used a prison reform experiment to think about freedom - and that message still bears repeating.

The titling of V Shantaram’s Do Aankhen Barah Haath involves a series of hand-prints being made. Each time a hand is lifted off the screen, it leaves adark impression – and a printed title appears at its centre. The hand-prints obviously make a reference to the film’s name – literally ‘Two Eyes, Twelve Hands’. But whose hands are we speaking of, and why do they matter?

Shantaram lets the mystery linger for a little while, even as he takes us directly into his milieu, opening with a sequence of theatrical excess that involves a jailer kicking prisoners. The symbolic humiliation of placing bootclad feet violently on the back of another human being is particularly great in an Indian context where the feet are believed to be the most impure part of the body – you are brought up to apologise if your feet touch someone by mistake, and you only touch another’s feet voluntarily as a way of emphasising your social inferiority in relation to the other person.

After this temporary focus on feet, Shantaram slowly and deliberately returns us to hands. Hands are, by their very nature, a stand-in for action – and in the case of the criminal offenders whom Shantaram places at the centre of his film, those actions are violent ones. When the junior prison official Adinath (played by Shantaram himself) gets permission to launch an experiment in prison reform, he chooses six men convicted of particularly grisly crimes. He uses the cinematic medium to great effect as they are introduced, overlaying the almost comical excess of these gruff, hefty men with their own memories – memories in which they used their hands to take lives. Now those same powerful hands, Adinath decides, are to be put to honest labour. The man who once lifted a boulder to murder his wife is told to build a dam with enormous stones; another who had committed his crime with an axe is told to clear the shrubs with one.

Hand-prints, of course, are also tied to personal identification, in a context of assumed illiteracy as well as one of modern policing. By the mid-20th century, fingerprinting had been around as a technique of criminal forensics for at least fifty years, and Shantaram plays with the way that humans had internalised that knowledge. When Adinath, trying to establish a rapport with the men, asks their names, they respond by silently making hand impressions on a piece of paper. “If we run away, it is our handprints that you will find useful to trace us – not our names,” says one. It is as if we were to introduce ourselves with our Aadhaar numbers.

Shantaram in 1957 was already a veteran, with the founding of Prabhat Film Company and pioneering films like Manoos, Kunku and Shevari behind him. For Do Aankhen, he chose to depart from the technicolour seductiveness of Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje (a dance-heavy drama which had been the third biggest Hindi hit of 1955) for an almost Expressionist black and white. Do Aankhen unfolds at a deliberate pace, with dramatically staged set pieces and several weepy moments.

But alongside the high drama is a goofy brand of humour, exemplified for instance in the scene where the six men, all hulking moustachioed brutes, prop up a dismantled barbed wire fence so as to view an attractive woman safely from behind it. It is as if the charms of Champa, a toy-seller played by Shantaram’s third wife Sandhya, are such that they prefer to lock themselves up.

The scene may be comic, but it is in fact of a piece with the film’s view of masculinity, of violence – and of freedom itself. The large patch of barren land where the convicts settle is named Azaad Nagar – Freedom Town. On their very first night there, they find themselves so discomfited by the prospect of sleeping in an unlocked room that they chain their feet together, weighing the chains down with their agricultural implements.

Months later, in what is the final test of their reformation, they promise Adinath that they are capable of selling their fresh-grown vegetables in the local sabzi mandi without being roused to violence. When they get there, however, the low prices they are selling at make them the target of the local middleman and his goons, who attack them in full public view.

Shantaram pegs his climax on the men’s transformation from brutish hulks – who had been quick to snatch another’s food when hungry, or react to perceived injustice with the threat of violence – to mute sufferers even in the face of one-sided beatings. This is a film made ten years after Indian independence, and it sends out a message about ahimsa that is strongly in synch with the Gandhian position on non-violence. The true exercise of collective freedom involves curtailing our baser instincts – not setting our worst selves free to roam. It is a lesson we could all do with in Modi’s India.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Aug 2017.

Prisoners of the Mind

My Mumbai Mirror column yesterday:

The jail as a space holds an abiding interest for Badlapur's director Sriram Raghavan, serving as an instrument to analyse power relationships between the characters in his films.

Sriram Raghavan was a movie buff much before he became a director, and it's something he's always worn on his sleeve. In 2007's Johnny Gaddaar, his best-received film till date, Raghavan paid cinematic tribute to Vijay Anand's thriller Johnny Mera Naam, Stanley Kubrick's noir The Killing, and the celebrated murder sequence from the Amitabh Bachchan starrer Parwana - among many classics. His last outing, the rollicking (and unfairly panned) Agent Vinod, was a spy thriller: a James Bond homage served with an Indian flavour and a twinkle in the eye. In his latest, Badlapur, when the heist-and-murder-accused Laik arrives in jail for what is going to be a long stretch in captivity, the prisoners gather round a television on which Sholay is playing. "Bees baras jail mein rehne ke baad sab kucch bhool jaoge, Gabbar," announces Sanjeev's Kumar's Thakur to Amjad Khan's iconic dacoit. 

Unlike Gabbar, Nawazuddin Siddiqui's Laik completes most of his 15-year jail sentence. But as Raghavan makes clear, in Badlapur and in his gripping first feature, Ek Hasina Thi (2004), time in jail needn't wipe out memories of one's past. 

Badlapur comes a decade after Ek Hasina Thi, but the two films have much in common: The hardening of innocents, and the passage of time in expectation of revenge. In EHT, it was the trusting Sarika (Urmila Matondkar), jailed on a trumped-up charge of being the mistress of an underworld don, who went from wide-eyed child-woman to steely avenger. In Badlapur, it is Varun Dhawan's youthful family man Raghu who makes the transition to a man solely possessed by the idea of vengeance. Female revenge sagas seem to necessarily involve a physical transformation - think Khoon Bhari Maang for a classic Hindi movie example - and EHT was no exception. Matondkar's Sarika went from long crinkly locks, bell sleeves and ultra-feminine gathered skirts to a more practical crop and fitted trousers. Raghu, too, goes from wholesome and clean-shaven to stubbly and then bearded in his grief-stricken avatar. 

But Raghavan's journey from EHT to Badlapur involves much more than a simple change in the gender of his protagonist. He's playing with the same concerns - tragedy, revenge, innocence, evil - but the game feels quite different. For one, unlike in EHT, it isn't the clean-cut middle class young person (Dhawan) who is thrown into prison. It is the bad apple, the petty thief who's never done anything right, the guy who we've just seen shooting two innocents for no fault of their own. 

So, logically we ought to spend the film feeling glad: The bad guy's in prison, isn't he? But Raghavan pushes the knife in, and then turns it slowly -- Siddiqui's unforgettable portrayal of Laik makes him powerfully, unmistakeably human. He may lie in court and ogle girls on the street, but he is also a man who truly loves -- and is loved back by -- at least one woman. What is truly appealing is his zest for life. His longing for chicken korma and Thai massage remains undimmed by years in the wilderness of jail. 

Jail itself is clearly of interest to Raghavan. In EHT, it was a women's prison, a place of madness and misery, as places of female incarceration have been in films from Bimal Roy's Bandini to Bruno Dumont's affecting Camille (2013), about the real-life sculptress Camille Claudel. For the gentle Sarika, the cruel truth of her lover's betrayal only sinks in alongside the horror of what she must endure because of it. The rats in her prison cell and the terrible food are not the worst of it. It is the casual humiliations, the mindless fights, the power games and the bullying that come to make jail seem, in her mind and ours, a microcosm of the world outside. If you learn to survive this, Raghavan seems to suggest, you're equipped for anything the outside world can throw at you. 

And yet there are also those for whom jail is a refuge of sorts: The half-crazed Dolly, with whom Sarika shares her cell, declares quite seriously that prison food is delicious, while Pratima Kazmi's impressive Pramila, playing the widow of a mafia don, stays in prison voluntarily because it is a safe haven, away from both the police and gangs. 

The depiction of jail in Badlapur is quite different from that in EHT. There is the occasional bout of violence here, too. But unlike the wild, unsupervised cat-fights and the free-for-all sense of the women's prison he created in 2007, Raghavan paints Badlapur's jail as a Foucauldian space: beds in straight lines, a place of discipline and punishment. Laiq even inhabits it as a space of labour: he learns to make chairs, which will earn him money. And eventually it is the medicalisation of jail as a space, its recognition of his diseased body, which allows him to gain a few months of physical freedom. 

Meanwhile we have Raghu, who immerses himself in his grief, churning it deeper and deeper until it curdles into violence. He is physically free, but mentally incarcerated. If the relentless passage of the years, without being able to move on with one's life, is prison's real punishment, then Raghu has done as the film says: imprisoned himself in his own jail. He has made time stand still. 

Badlapur's eventual take on revenge seems to me more ambitious than film noir in the traditional sense. It reverses our ideas about what justice might mean, but also our idea of who is deserving of it.